


[Fanvid] Hallelujah

by Ariaste



Category: Good Omens (TV), Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: M/M, more like the exquisite ache of tenderness, not really angst, rip your heart out but then hug it
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-18
Updated: 2019-11-07
Packaged: 2020-05-13 23:46:34
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19261618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ariaste/pseuds/Ariaste
Summary: A fanvid to the Pentatonix version of "Hallelujah". (Now featuring Chapter 2, an essay on the making of the vid!)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This was actually harder than my Bohemian Rhapsody vid?? Please for the love of god give me a wahoo, I spent TEN HOURS perfecting the two seconds of smashcuts at timestamp 4:05
> 
> Also the original thesis of this video was “*princess bride voice* every time they sang Hallelujah what they really meant was I love you.” More about that in the next chapter, the behind-the-scenes Making-Of documentary of this vid ;)
> 
> (on tumblr as @ariaste, and twitter as @_alexrowland)


	2. Hallelujah: A Nice and Accurate Essay Concerning the Creation of a Fanvid

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> So I had originally just written this in google docs and linked it in the description of the youtube video, but I realized that was very silly, and I should just put it on here with the vid itself too. Enjoy!

 

It was a rainy day in mid-June, and I decided that there were two absolutely crucial songs that needed to be used for Good Omens fanvids. The first was Bohemian Rhapsody, and while I knew that it’d occur to  _ someone, eventually _ , I was skeptical about whether anyone in their right mind would actually go through with it. It’s a very long song, a very  _ complicated _ song. You’d have to be a bit nuts to take on a project like that, right? Fortunately I am a bit neurodivergent, so I settled down with my ADHD, learned how to do video editing, and hyperfocused for 14 hours.

The second song was, of course,  [ “Hallelujah ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iy40Djo99vY) ”. 

 

* * *

 

**The Song**

 

One of the most amazing things about “Hallelujah” as a song is that it touches so many hearts in such a particular way. If a heart is a wine glass, “Hallelujah” is a finger running around the rim, making it vibrate at a singing frequency. I’ve never met someone who didn’t have at least one Feeling when they hear it.

How incredible is it that we can find so much nuance of emotion in this one song? There are dozens of covers of it! No matter who sings it, you hear them reach into this deep, raw place and make the song entirely their own. It’s the same tune, the same words, but the experience of it is entirely unique every time. Consider how it sounds when KD Lang, a lesbian,  [ sings it on stage in 2005 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P_NpxTWbovE) . Then consider Kate McKinnon, also a lesbian,  [ singing it on SNL after Election Week in 2016 ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BG-_ZDrypec) . Consider Daniel Kahn, a Jewish man,  [ singing it in Yiddish ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XH1fERC_504) , versus Mennel Ibtissem, a Muslim woman,  [ singing it in English and Arabic ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5ORMgl_KPE) on France’s version of The Voice. It is the same damn song, and yet these four performances of it considered in their context are all saying something completely, completely different.  _ Every _ performance says something different, even when they include the same usual verses in the same usual order.

So the first task was to find the performance that said the thing I wanted to make a vid about.

There were other factors as well -- I needed a nice clean recording, rather than something performed on stage for an audience (people tend to go harder for an audience than they do on a recording, but the audience makes noise, blehhh). I needed a version that I liked listening to, that I could listen to for 20 hours straight if I had to (I’m sorry, Leonard Cohen, your lyrics are incredible but I can’t stand your voice!! ;_;). I also wanted one that had a strong emotional dynamic range -- this last ruled out a lottttt of the versions (sorry Jeff Buckley and Rufus Wainwright! Your versions pick one emotional register and stick to it).

So. Pentatonix. 

We all have some mixed feelings about Pentatonix, I think. While their cover of Hallelujah leaves out a couple of my most favorite verses (“I tried my best it wasn’t much” being the big one for me), it does have an _enormous_ emotional dynamic range, and that became the deciding factor. It has a plot arc, starting quietly subdued and then rising-rising- _rising_ to this absolutely triumphant, exultant climax of praise and love and _joy_.

That’s the sort of raw material you can work with. That’s the vid I wanted to make. 

No contest, really, when it came right down to it. 

 

* * *

  
  


**Storyboarding**

 

I don’t know how other people make fanvids, but I like to have a roadmap before I start. After all, I’m not just throwing random clips at the song in any old order--for me, making vids requires an amount of literary criticism that, in my pre-vidmaking days, I would have found frankly astonishing. Obviously the first step is to find a song that speaks to your fandom in that way, but then you settle down with it and pick it apart to find out  _ why.  _ What do these lyrics mean? What are they saying, both on the surface level and on deeper ones? (I wish that someone had told me, in high school and college, that poetry analysis could be like this. I would have been a lot less angry and confused about it if I’d known the sort of practical applications it could have.)

Then you do the same thing for your visual source material and analyze the shit out of that too, and then you find places where the song and the source parallel each other. 

Except it’s not quite that simple, because you don’t want parallels that are too literal -- it comes across as a rather shallow and twee interpretation of the text. We’ve all seen those fanvids where the image matches up to the literal words of the song. We’ve never been really impressed, have we? It doesn’t tell us anything new, or give us insight into the vid-maker’s perspective on the source/text that they’re performatively analyzing. (The exception to this is if you’re making a vid that’s supposed to be funny on purpose. In that case, the juxtaposition of matching images and lyrics can be quite effective -- please see my Bohemian Rhapsody video, specifically the lines “Mama, just killed a man” and “I see a little silhouetto of a man”, where I used this effect intentionally for humor.)

 

Anyway. So you have your song analyzed, you have bits of your source material analyzed, you’re ready to start matching them up. As you work on this, you might begin to notice that a thesis statement develops. For “Hallelujah” the thesis quickly emerged as, “Buttercup realized that every time Westley sang ‘Hallelujah’, what he really meant was ‘I love you’”. Do what you can to stick to your thesis statement and provide supporting evidence, just as you would in an academic essay ;D 

 

Unfortunately, no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy, so as I was assembling the clips I found some that simply didn’t work as I wanted them to and had to substitute new ones. So let’s look a little closer at some of the lyrics-image pairings of the final version:

 

_ No Music, prologue _ _ : Crowley in Eden saying, “I can’t see what’s so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil anyway,” and Aziraphale about to argue. _

This is where we begin -- it is both the beginning of the song, and the Beginning of the World, and the beginning of their relationship. It is the baseline that everything else hinges on: Crowley doesn’t see what’s so bad about knowing the difference. He questions. He makes the first move, as he always does. Remember this line, because we’re going to mirror it right at the end of the song. 

 

_ “You don’t really care for music, do you?” _ _ : Aziraphale uncertain, Crowley saying “celestial harmonies” _

The other option would have been Aziraphale in the car saying, “Oh,  _ bebop _ ” but that would have been a bit too on-the-nose. It does work on that obvious level -- Aziraphale is quite limited in the kind of music he enjoys -- but on the deeper level, it frames Aziraphale as the “you” who is failing to understand or relate to something, and therefore Crowley as the narrator trying valiantly to reach him, pose questions to him, explain himself, and find common ground. 

 

_ “The minor fall, the major lift”: _ _ Crowley in Eden; Aziraphale at the church in the Blitz _

Apparently this is the line where most people start clutching their hearts and going “Oh shit”? Here we have the two moments that fandom commonly accepts as The Big Romantic Landmarks -- the minor fall is Crowley first falling a little bit in love; the major lift is Aziraphale having his big epiphany about his feelings. 

“Minor fall” also works on a secondary level as a joke about “sauntered vaguely downwards” and no one ever notices that. :( Rude, whatever,  _ I _ thought it was funny.

 

_ The first set of Hallelujahs _

Various ways Crowley has said “I love you” through acts of service. 

 

_ The whole second verse _

The point-of-view here switches from just Crowley (as it was in the first verse) to both of them together as a unit, and features a selection of things they have said and done that have absolutely devastated each other, whether accidentally or purposefully. It is all the times that Crowley has reached out, all the times he has been waiting in the middle for Aziraphale to reach back -- and all the times Aziraphale has had to flinch away. In particular, see  _ “her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you” _ . We as a fandom have spent a lot of time talking about Crowley’s emotional reaction in this scene (and even Aziraphale acknowledges it, when he says “Oh don’t look so disappointed”, just in case we needed a Big Ol’ Neon Sign pointed at it) but Aziraphale is having a downright seismic emotional event in this moment as well! He, too, is being “overthrown”.

_ “She tied you to her kitchen chair” _ is a line that I had to handle very carefully, according to my draw-parallels-but-not-too-blatantly rule described above. Let’s take this in several pieces, cause it’s a complicated one: “Kitchen chair” is evocative of home; the kitchen is arguably the most  _ home  _ place of an entire building. It is the heart of the house -- just look at how people tend to gravitate there at parties, how we associate kitchens with warmth, and emotional as well as literal nourishment. The kitchen chair is informal, familiar. The conversations you have with someone in the kitchen are more intimate somehow than the ones you have in, for example, the living room.

Tying someone up (or being tied up) is about power. If consensual, it’s about surrendering yourself to their will and trusting that they won’t hurt you or make you feel less than safe. But we can’t talk about this without the context of the rest of the line:  _ “She broke your throne and she cut your hair” _ is a reference to the Biblical story of Delilah who, by cutting her lover Samson’s hair, destroyed the source of his power. In other words, this entire verse (and this line in particular) are a commentary on ways we become vulnerable to someone when we love them. Knowing that it’s about Samson and Delilah casts on the previous half of the line a suggestion that the “tied you to her kitchen chair” wasn’t necessarily fully consensual -- in the Bible story, Delilah uses trickery and deceit (and, in some interpretations, seduction, though this is controversial). Because Samson was supernaturally strong, she would not have been able to overpower him physically, so he would have had to comply in that regard, but her motivations were dishonest -- she fooled him into being tied, and so any consent he gave was under false pretences. Knowing that, the “tied you” part of the line can be interpreted more as, “I didn’t know what I was getting into, I didn’t expect this to happen, and now my heart’s been broken.” 

Therefore!!! I have paired “ _ She tied you to her kitchen chair _ ” with the scene of the bookshop burning -- it is the shock of unexpected heartbreak, it is vulnerability, and it is  _ home.  _

The  _ “She broke your throne and she cut your hair” _ scene pairing can be explained no better than in this  [ fantastic bit of meta ](https://ariaste.tumblr.com/post/185969191744/forineffablereasons-aziraphale-always-rejects) that someone wrote on tumblr. Combined with the above stuff about Delilah and power and vulnerability, I have nothing else to add, that’s flawless. 

From there, the last line  _ “From your lips she drew the hallelujah” _ shows the first time Crowley asked him to run away together, and then….

 

_ The second set of Hallelujahs _

_ “Go off together?” /  “I’ll give you a lift, anywhere you wanna go.” / “You can stay at my place if you like.” --  _ Please note the parallels of “go, go, stay”, and then… 

_ “You can’t say no.”  _ ...then, finally: Aziraphale, in the middle of flinching away yet again, pauses. And turns back. (It is worth pointing out that the dialogue line “You can’t say no” in the show is from sliiightly earlier in that same scene, and is bracketed on either side by Aziraphale firmly saying no. The visual used in the show is actually Crowley saying “At least let me tempt you to lunch” -- and that, right there, is something about which Aziraphale really can’t say no. Always, always, Crowley reaches out. And always, Aziraphale eventually pauses and turns back.)

 

_ “[vocals]” _ _ Visual rhyming of pointing/looking up _

This is just me being a little bit artsy. I really, really love it when fanvids do visual rhyming, that’s all. 

I mean, it’s  _ not _ all, because the word “hallelujah” means “sing praise to God”, and God is generally agreed to live “Up There” and we can certainly read more into these four images (Crowley pointing up in the church during the Blitz to direct everyone’s attention to the imminent bomb; Aziraphale talking about the kraken rising “right up” at the end; Aziraphale looking up when he’s being “exorcised” back to heaven; Crowley looking up during his rant at God) and talk about how they’re all linked, and how the first two are Group moments and the latter two are Individual moments, and how our relationships with other people (including with the higher power, if you happen to be religious) are simultaneously about the collective group of you-and-other-person  _ and _ both-of-you-as-individuals, and about how that means there’s three entities in any two-person relationship (and SEVEN entities in any three-person relationship, dear lord: the group, three individuals, and three pairs), but honestly I think there’s more exciting parts of this song, so let’s move on, shallllllllll we?

 

_ “Baby, I’ve been here before…”   _

Had to be more scenes in the bookshop, of course! Familiarity, coziness, home.

 

_ “I used to live alone before I knew you” _ :  _ Aziraphale sheltering Crowley under his wing in Eden _

This is the line that gets  _ me  _ choked up every time I watch it -- even before they knew each other, they’ve never been alone! They’ve always had each other! I’m crying!!

Also the syncing of Crowley’s soft, round gesture on the word “used to” emphasize him as the narrator of this particular line. 

 

_ “I’ve seen your flag on the marble arch”: _ _ Crowley exiting the burning bookshop _

So the image of a flag on a marble arch says two things to me -- the first is another image of home, of  _ territory _ . Someone’s flag (read: heraldic device aka coat of arms) is displayed on places that belong to them. However, a marble arch specifically says to me  _ conquering _ . As in:  _ “Here is the palace of my heart, and you invaded and conquered it--” _ which ties back to the “broke your throne” vulnerability of the previous verse,  _ “--and hung your flag from the marble arches of all my architecture to show that the city had been taken. I am defeated, I surrender to you.” _ Pairing it with the stone doorway of the burning bookshop (aka the recurring motif of “home” that I’ve used throughout the video so far) is perhaps a little literal, but the emotional parallel of Crowley’s moment of embracing his devastation was too good not to risk overdoing it. 

The conquering-army imagery is further emphasized by the next line….

 

_ “Love is not a victory march” _ _ : Aziraphale storming off after the fight about the holy water (“Obviously!” “Obviously.”) _

Love  _ isn’t _ a victory march, it’s the opposite. It is, again, surrender, but it is also the moments of battle. Love isn’t always triumph and joy and two unified people. Sometimes love is clashing individuals who care fiercely but in irreconcilable ways, and so the argument about the holy water is a perfect moment to pair with this line: Aziraphale refuses to provide it  _ because  _ he loves Crowley too much. “It would destroy you,” he says. “I won’t give you a suicide pill.” Even the faint possibility of Crowley’s death, in Aziraphale’s world, is not just unacceptable, but unconscionable. He cares, he loves, and yet…. He does not yet trust. Even though Crowley says that’s not why he wants it, Aziraphale doesn’t trust him to be telling the truth, or to know himself as well as Aziraphale knows him. Love is not a victory march.

 

_ “It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah”: _ _ “I lost my best friend.” _

Yeah I think this one pretty much explains itself, eh? :D

 

_ The third set of hallelujahs _

The images here lead immediately from the previous line. “I lost my best friend,” Crowley says, and then we have flashbacks to moments in the progression of their friendship -- “I don’t even like you”, and “I can’t have you risking your life”, and “I forgive you,” and finally on last  _ hallelujah _ we snap out of the flashback and Aziraphale apologizes -- “I’m so sorry to hear it.”

This is a moment that has gotten quite a lot of debate in the fandom. Many people have interpreted Aziraphale’s reaction here to mean that he  _ doesn’t know  _ that Crowley is talking about  _ him _ , but I would argue that it’s more British than that? Crowley is displaying vulnerable emotion in a very uncharacteristic way: He is showing his hurt openly instead of doing the usual Crowley version of stiff-upper-lip (the careful and studied Performance of cool). Aziraphale is quite understandably startled and does the Very British thing of dealing with someone’s Emotional Display, to wit: he attempts to preserve Crowley’s dignity for him by Politely Pretending That It’s Not Happening (for further clarification of this phenomenon, please see RP Tyler’s response to Crowley’s  _ car being on  _ **_fire_ ** . There is someone being a Total Disaster right in front of him, and he fundamentally cannot bring himself to say so out loud. That is how the British do). 

To the American eye, that reads as  _ deeply  _ oblivious, because that is not at all how we do feelings. We don’t like to leave things unsaid. The framing here, the plausible deniability, is that Aziraphale is apologizing for Crowley’s loss of his Unnamed Best Friend, but in actuality Aziraphale _ totally knows that it’s him  _ because he is intelligent, but because he is also extremely polite and very British (and gayer than a treeful of monkeys etc)  _ he cannot actually bring himself to address it directly.  _

His solution? He addresses it indirectly! He’s not apologizing for Crowley’s loss, he’s just straight-up  _ apologizing.  _ He is saying, “I’m sorry for what I said and did, I want to be friends, I care for you, you haven’t lost me.” He’s trying to do the Crowley thing of reaching out, but he hasn’t had a whole lot of practice.

 

_ The whole fourth verse _

This verse is the darkness before the dawn, and it’s paired with further moments of great despair and uncertainty -- Crowley’s yelling-at-god moment in his apartment, the hellfire in heaven, the fight at the bandstand, the “We can’t give up now” / “We’re fucked” moment during the Apocalypse.

_ “All I’ve ever learned from love was how to shoot somebody who outdrew you” _ . This is further commentary on the vulnerability of love: The only way to get out of love unscathed is to hurt them before they hurt you, because if you love them then they’re already in a position of power over you -- they outdrew you. The scene pairing here is a bit interesting, because there’s the literal interpretation (Crowley and Aziraphale anticipated that Heaven and Hell would ambush them, so they planned ahead and switched bodies, preparing to “shoot somebody who outdrew [them].”), but I want to make a vague and complicated point using a constellation of several other points, so bear with me here while I number the particular stars I want to draw your attention to:

  1.  angels are supposed to be creatures of love (ie: in Tadfield, when Aziraphale can sense the ambient love)
  2. demons being of the same stock as angels (see: the dancing on the head of a pin bit)
  3. Moral essentialism (“you’re a demon, that’s what you do”)
  4. Crowley’s choices and regrets (“I didn’t mean to fall, I just hung around the wrong people”)



It’s all about free will, right? Crowley Fell because he asked too many questions. In Aziraphale’s “trial” in heaven, when Crowley is in disguise, he has a chance to act out a different way that his Fall could have gone -- even if he had been the perfect angel (and in his perception, Aziraphale IS what an angel ought to be; when he’s acting as Aziraphale, he argues that, “We’re supposed to be the good guys.” He genuinely believes that, and he believes that Aziraphale believes it), even when he is singing the Official Party Line of Heaven, it doesn’t matter. Heaven betrays him anyway, again. They betray even Aziraphale, Crowley’s ideal of goodness,  _ because they aren’t good _ . They outdrew him once before, six thousand years ago, and he has so much resentment (and probably regret) about what happened, and he cries out that it wasn’t his fault--

And finally, in this moment, he believes the things he’s saying. He sees that he’s been right all along, that it really _wasn’t_ his fault. Heaven doesn’t actually have a monopoly on righteousness; they’re hypocrites as much as anyone else is. It _really_ _wasn’t his fault_. He claimed earlier that he’s unforgivable, and I posit that this, right here, is the moment he forgives himself.

Heaven betrays him, but this time, he’s ready. He’s prepared. He can shoot somebody who outdrew him, and save himself and Aziraphale in one go by being invulnerable to the harm they try to cause him -- an invulnerability they  _ gave him  _ when they cast him out of heaven.

 

_ The fourth set of hallelujahs _

It begins with Aziraphale’s “Or I’ll never talk to you again”, and Crowley’s shock at that absolutely unthinkable threat (because Aziraphale’s right, if the war happens then neither of them will ever talk again, it’s as much a “I’ll slam the door in your face” as a “We’ll be taken from each other, we’ll be torn apart”) and it continues to more flashbacks, moments that they were together as a unified front and  _ specifically  _ moments when Crowley’s attention was fixed on Aziraphale.

And on the last  _ hallelujah _ , the song shifts gears from defeated into exultant, and Crowley works the biggest miracle in the entire show and stops time. The power of friendship, y’all!

  
  
  


_ The fifth and sixth sets of hallelujahs _

Leonard Cohen said, “The song explains that many kinds of Hallelujahs do exist. I say: All the perfect and broken Hallelujahs have an equal value. It's a desire to affirm my faith in life, not in some formal religious way but with enthusiasm, with emotion."

_ “How long have we been friends?” _ Crowley asks. There has been so much pain, and so many moments where they were failing to reach each other, where they flinched away from each other… And so many moments of joy, and good conversation, and sitting together on park benches.  _ “Six thousand years.” _

And after all that time of imperfection and trying-and-failing-and-trying again, they’ve finally achieved harmony. They’re unified solidly, like two compasses pointed towards the same magnetic north. _ “You don’t have a side anymore… We’re on our own side. _ ”

And then, the final “hallelujah”, the culmination of the song, the emotional climax, begins with them switching back bodies, and flashes through seven smashcuts of joy.

 

_ [humming] _ _ : Epilogue, “I like to think none of this would have worked out if you weren’t, at heart, just a little bit of a good person.” “And if you weren’t, deep down, just enough of a bastard to be worth knowing.” _

Remember at the beginning when I told you to remember Crowley’s opening line? “I don’t see what’s so bad about knowing the difference between good and evil anyway”? Here we are at the conclusion: There isn’t good and there isn’t bad. There’s no black and white, just shades of grey, and there they are in the middle, accepting themselves, each other, and each other’s perception of them. Remember that thing I said about there being three entities in any two-person relationship? The two as individuals and as a pair? Here we are, all three of them: Complete and whole, acting in perfect harmony. 

Hallelujah.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [Hallelujah](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22665235) by [witchy_teacup](https://archiveofourown.org/users/witchy_teacup/pseuds/witchy_teacup)




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